Constable: Cubs fan not shaving half his face until World Series win

At 74 years old, lifelong Cubs fan Don Miller Sr. is all in. His beard, however, remains just half in, thanks to Miller's pledge not to shave both sides of his face until the Cubs win the World Series.

“Everywhere I go, little kids see me and stare,” Miller, of Palatine, says, stroking the half of his chin that sports a beard. “Adults glance real fast. And then I have to tell them why I'm doing this.”

Miller's love affair with the Cubs started when he was 10 years old. In the glorious season of 1952, Cubs left fielder Hank Sauer slugged a league-leading 37 homers and drove in a league-leading 121 runs.

“The Cubs finished last the year before. He brought the Cubs up to fifth place,” Miller says of Sauer's heroics.

Miller's first Cubs game was a disaster. With only enough money to buy one ticket, he and a buddy were hanging around the bleachers when a big kid gave him a boost over the wall.

“I ripped my new jacket my great-grandmother bought for me down at Maxwell Street,” says Miller.

Not only did that earn him a spanking when he got home, but Miller spent the first few innings wandering around Wrigley Field looking for his friend, who bought a ticket. It wasn't until he gave up and stepped outside the ballpark that he spotted his buddy in the top row of the bleachers.

But Miller didn't let that bad first game taint his love for the Cubs. He still watches every game - well, almost.

“I'm kind of cheap. We don't have cable TV,” says Miller, who turns to his trusty old radio if he can't find the game on free TV. “I use this Westinghouse transistor.”

While she admits to a slight preference for a clean-shaven hubby, Miller's wife, Anne, 73, says she has no problem with the half-beard.

“No, I'm used to him,” says his bride of nearly 55 years and mother of their children, Tammy, Don Jr. and Karl. The couple run 3 miles together every day at the local YMCA, where he makes a point of learning people's names and being friendly.

In 1969, when the Cubs seemed poised to go to the World Series, only to collapse, Miller was having a crummy summer, too. The sort-of-short story is that he skipped work to man the hot-dog stand he and his wife started in Palatine, got fired from his job making copiers for a Mount Prospect company, got into a fight with his wife, and headed to California with all of his possessions in an old Volkswagen.

When that car died, he traded it and a commemorative Winchester rifle for another car. When the second car died, he pushed it off a cliff and hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where, even though he didn't know his married sister's last name or her address, he ran into her by chance at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.

He took a job in California with the same company that had fired him in Illinois and had just used his first paycheck to buy ping-pong paddles when his wife told him to come home, Miller says.

Unlike the '69 Cubs, the Millers had a happy ending. They once were featured in a Daily Herald story for their healthy lifestyle, which included “Buns of Steel” workouts and healthy diets. Miller has completed seven marathons and still does his yoga “peacock pose,” where he presses his palms on the floor and supports his entire body in a plank at elbow-level.

He's also an artist and a writer.

Miller's most noteworthy Cubs moment came in 1999, when he and his sons won the Mayor's Award at Palatine's July Fourth parade by building a giant Harry Caray float out of chicken wire and papier-mâché, with hands and lips that moved as he sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

“Harry had just died. I had mixed emotions about it since Harry was once flirting with my wife as we watched Barbie Benton sing a country-and-western song at the O'Hare Sheraton,” Miller remembers.

But that, like many of Miller's memories, is a story for a different day.

Embarrassed by his Cubs a few years ago, Miller wore all his Cubs shirts inside out and backward with handwritten notes explaining, “Old Cubs shirt, OK?” Now, he's a proud Cubs fan.

If the Cubs don't win it all this year, his half-beard might have a full life, but Miller is confident this Cubs team is different from all the other Cubs teams he's endured.

“Joe (Cubs manager Joe Maddon) stepped up and we've got a new team. They're a bunch of hungry kids who want to win and have fun,” Miller says, remembering Cubs legend Ernie Banks' ability to come up with catchy slogans such as “The Cubs will shine in '69,” Miller says, “In sweet '16, the Cubs will be supreme.”